against my skin through the sheaths and the material of my clothes. I hated having to carry weapons. I’d been alone for so long, I’d started putting my weapons away. I had allowed myself to believe that my life could be peaceful.
After this, it would be. Once Maksim was taken care of, my life would belong to me once and for all.
Angela
Sleeping with Viktor was incredible. He was amazing in bed, drawing me out of my virgin shell, encouraging me, making me feel alive in a way I’d never felt before.
But I wanted more than that with him. Of course, I wanted to sleep with him all the time. And we kind of were… but I didn’t just want to sleep with him. I wanted to know what he was like as a person.
After spending a lot of the day in bed, Viktor and I showered together in his tiny shower. We didn’t need a lot of space, pushed up against each other the way we were. Of course, I don’t think we were exactly clean when we climbed out, starving.
We wandered to the kitchen to make food. His shelves were sparse, but I found pasta, pasta sauce, bacon, and cheese. I could do something with that.
“Did you go out hunting earlier?” I asked. Viktor hesitated before he nodded, and I lifted a brow. “You didn’t bring anything back.”
“The animals are hiding away from the weather,” he replied.
I glanced out of the front window that looked out over the valley. Clouds were gathering and the wind was picking up, but it didn’t look threatening. If a storm was coming, it was still far off. “Already?”
Viktor nodded. “The storm comes from the mountain,” he said. “That over there is just for fun.”
“Fun?”
“Mother Nature likes to play.”
“Like the mudslide I was caught in,” I said darkly.
Viktor chuckled and nodded. “It’s a reminder of how small we really are.”
I didn’t know if I needed reminding in such a way. But being caught in that mudslide had brought me to Viktor. It was strange how things worked out sometimes.
“What happens when you get stuck in something like that and you’re out here all alone?” I asked as I grated cheese. Viktor sliced the bacon strips into small pieces so we could add it to our makeshift pasta salad.
“I don’t get stuck like that,” he said.
“You can’t tell me accidents don’t happen around here,” I commented, stopping the chopping to glance at him when I asked.
He glanced at me. “If you learn to read the forest, you can avoid accidents, as you call them. The forest is alive, and you need to compromise with it. The way you do in any relationship.”
“You’re comparing your stay on the mountain to a relationship?” I asked, curious, resuming the chopping.
Viktor nodded at me. “And why not? You read your partner’s moods, don’t you? And you act accordingly. It's about give and take.”
“What do you give the land?” I asked.
Viktor pulled up his shoulders. “I let it be in peace. I live off what it has to offer, and I plant to replenish. In return, the land is kind to me.”
I couldn’t argue with that. “Did you grow up like this?”
Viktor stiffened. “Like what?”
“Alone in the mountains. Secluded from the rest of the world.”
He hesitated again before he answered. “I grew up in a small Russian town south of St. Petersburg. There was no mountain where I grew up.”
“How did you learn to live like this?”
Viktor shrugged his shoulders. “When you’re thrown into a swimming pool, you learn to sink or you swim.”
I finished the bacon and scraped it from the cutting board into a bowl. The pasta would take a while to cook since it had to cook in a pot over the fire outside. The only hot water available was rainwater, heated by a small solar panel in a sort of container outside, and it wasn’t drinkable. It was for showering only.
Viktor had retrieved the pot from underneath the sink for me and I put the pasta into it. “Come,” he said, and we left the cabin, walking to the fire pit.
I watched him start a little flame with twigs and a long lighter for grills. He kindled the flame into being, adding more sticks and larger pieces of wood to the pile until the fire burned strong enough to not be blown out by the strengthening breeze. I looked up at the sky. It was overcast now, but the clouds were a light grey. Still no